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cellphone virus
Last modified: Friday, September 15, 2006
A cellphone (also called a
mobile phone) virus is
the equivalent to a computer virus, only it infects consumer cellphones and
spreads by way of MMS
attachments, Bluetooth transfers, and
Internet downloads. The most common type of cellphone virus is one
that travels from computers to cellphones by way of
infected files that are
downloaded from the Internet. However
cellphone-to-cellphone viruses, while less common, do exist.
The first known cellphone virus was called Cabir and was detected in
June 2004 by Kaspersky Labs. The Cabir worm was coded to infect
Symbian OS cellphones. Cabir was designed to scan for
all accessible phones using Bluetooth technology, and send a copy of itself to
the first one found. Setting your phone into a non-discoverable (hidden)
Bluetooth mode will protect your phone from the Cabir worm. But, once the phone
is infected it will try to infect other systems even if you try to disable
Bluetooth from system settings. In 2005 Cabir's
source code became widely available on the Internet.
Cnet: Cell phone virus turns up the heat Cell phone viruses, largely considered a paper tiger in the digital security world, became a bit more dangerous this week with the release of a two-pronged program.
